• Thumbs up

  Scribus is a DTP package that really packs a punch. It's highly useable, even though it has a rather steep learning curve. The PDF documents you can create with it are of professional quality. The 1.3.3.x releases are rock solid for production work. The upcoming 1.4 release has many hidden gems, like being able to embed instead of rasterizing EPS illustrations, greatly simplifying the workflow with Inkscape.

  posted by Bert Driehuis 119 days ago

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• Thumbs down

  Thumbs down is too strong because I believe this is a great start. It's the best open source DTP software right now because it is the only open source DTP software. I've been looking for quality alternatives to the very expensive Quark and Adobe offerings for years and have been hoping that the open source people would come up with something. Doing a brief tryout of Scribus (Mac OS X version) my main immediate concern is the use of a story editor interface. It reminds me of PageMaker and having used Quark for a couple of years, I find it quite clumsy to use. After you've located the way to edit text (by opening a separate story editor window) I discovered that it does not display the text in the font selected until you've closed the story editor window, making it impossible to see how it looks to make immediate adjustments. I can't tell if all or part of the text is in the font I selected or not. Also I didn't find the program accessing all of the fonts available on my system. I also didn't see any easily accessible controls for adjusting tracking, kerning or line spacing nor (if I remember correctly) options for justified text. In the main window I found the magnification control to be awkward. I'd much prefer a tool icon where I could click with the magnifying glass on the area I wished to see than a global one on the perimeter of the window. In short, the program is a great start but nowhere near being usable for my purposes. One last note: If you wish to emulate any software for ease of use, I would suggest Quark and avoid cheaper alternatives like PageMaker or MS Publisher. InDesign is powerful software but when I worked in Prepress I found it very difficult to exchange low-res images for high-res ones from client files. Think INTERFACE. People have to use this thing.

  posted by anonymous 2 days ago

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• Thumbs up

  I am very impressed by this software. My commercial printers are very happy with the files I submit though they have never heard of Scribus. Yes, it does have a steep learning curve, but things like Story Editor and Master Pages make the effort worthwhile. By the way, runs on NetBSD-5.0.1 without any problems that I can see.

  posted by anonymous 3 days ago

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